Metadata: Identification and Summary
Title
American Housing Survey
Alternative title
AHS
Description
The American Housing Survey (AHS) is sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey has been the most comprehensive national housing survey in the United States since its inception in 1973, providing current information on the size, composition, and quality of the nations housing and measuring changes in our housing stock as it ages.
The American AHS is a longitudinal housing unit survey that collects data on the Nations housing, including apartments, single-family homes, mobile homes, vacant housing units, household characteristics, income, housing and neighborhood quality, housing costs, equipment and fuels, size of housing unit, and recent movers.
The AHS was designed to include two samples, the National sample and the independent Metropolitan area sample. From 1973 to 2005, the AHS was two surveys conducted independently of one another. The National survey was enumerated every other odd-numbered year, while the Metropolitan survey occurred in selected areas on a rotating basis. Starting in 2007, the National and Metropolitan surveys were conducted in the same time-period to reduce costs.
The AHS returns to the same housing units year after year to gather data; therefore, this survey is ideal for analyzing the flow of households through housing. However, the 2015 American Housing Survey underwent a major redesign – a new sample was redrawn for the first time since 1985 and new households were asked to participate in the survey, the questionnaire was redesigned, variables were dropped, added, or modified, recodes and imputation methods were streamlined, and the weighting methodology changed. As a result, tables were redesigned and some estimates became incomparable with previous years.
Housing units participating in the AHS have been scientifically selected to represent all housing units in the U.S. The same housing units are interviewed every two years (this includes the 15 largest metropolitan areas). A rotating sample of twenty other Metropolitan areas are in sample every four years, ten in each survey year.
Each housing unit is weighted and represents between 450 and 4000 other housing units in the U.S. The weighting is designed to minimize sampling error and utilize independent estimates of occupied and vacant housing units.
The survey provides up-to-date information about the quality and cost of housing in the United States and major metropolitan areas. The survey also includes questions about:
-the physical condition of homes and neighborhoods,
-the costs of financing and maintaining homes, and
-the characteristics of people who live in these homes.
The project review timeframes above do not apply to applications that request access to confidential data assets commingled with data that are either not owned, or are only co-owned, by the statistical agency(s) or unit(s) and require approval from third parties not subject to this policy (e.g., state and local government agencies).
Source(s)
Census Bureau
General Survey Information
Data dictionary: https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/codebook/ahs/ahsdict.html
Questionnaire: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/2019/2019%20AHS%20Items%20Booklet.pdf
General documentation link: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/
Funder/Sponsor(s)
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Additional information about restricted data file